As RHEL 5 heads towards completion of Q1 of its lifecycle, team RHEL 5 released the seventh major revision of the product that was first released in March 2007.

Version 7 of RHEL 5 comes with bug fixes, some renewed drivers, optimizations and other features.

Optimized Virtualization

As expected virtualization is optimised with KVM and Xen. The KVM hypervisor has been tweaked so that CD drive emulation is enhanced. This also ensures boot sequence and related bugs/issues are handled more efficiently through this. Another, major feature happening here is that the migration time, that is, the time taken to shift guest systems from the host to running machines is vastly minimized.

Virtualization with Xen with 32-bit guest system is faster since Xen essentially has a faster guest booting system. Additionally, a whopping 256 storage drives are supported going beyond the standard 100. You will full support for XZ compression on kernels with the PyGrub that has been supported by Linux Kernel from 2.6.38 onwards.

Drivers improve hardware capabilities

The Linux Kernel 2.6.18 is likely to soon run out as RHEL 5.7 has umpteen driver updates and some newer ones as well.

Major changes that RHEL 5.7 will soon deliver on are the additional support extended for new processors, chipset from AMD, IBM to Intel as these changes are at the design-stage yet. Network bridges too have been tweaked with new functions being added and LDAP in Autofs being supported.

Therefore, the fibre-channel adapter and SAS-Chips now get storage drivers. To provide further support, version 08.101.00.000 of SCSI driver mpt2sas for WarpDrive series such as SSS-6200 is also included.

The RV635 /Radeon HD 36xx and RV730/Radeon HD 46XX chips support output through DisplayPort with the support for the Radeon graphics driver being included.10-gigabit Ethernet will be better supported with the inclusion of the new network drivers.

Probably for the first time the distribution has provided the iw_cxgb4 driver for handling T4 series Chelsio RDMA hardware. Besides, the atl1e network driver has gigabit chips powered by Atheros as part of the package. Another driver the qlc nic is supports the Large Recieve Offload (LRO) as well as the Generic Receive Offload (GRO).

Transition features

RHEL 5 will include the Red Hat’s Subscription Manager and Subscription Service, which was included in RHEL 6.1. Open SCAP ensure Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP)with developer library, tools and improved System Security Services.

With the XFS file system, RHEL clients can see high availability as well as Cluster Add-on full support.

Release Notes are available and details of further support for newer hardware will require clients to switch to newer RHEL releases in the future.